Ubi making a lot more franchise games

Ubisoft will be making a concerted effort to keep producing games based on their franchises, and are also planning to be making everything multiplayer, the company’s CEO has revealed.

"Our clear goal today is to come more regularly with our top brands," Guillemot said to investors (cheers IGN). He noted that in the past there had been substantial gaps between Splinter Cell, Driver and their other major franchise games.

"We believe we can launch them more often without risk of brand fatigue."

Apparently this doesn’t mean the company are to be straying away from creating new IP, in fact they’re to be releasing a couple of original titles in 2011 and 2012, Guillemot revealed.

The upcoming original titles are to include online play, as will everything else they’re to be releasing in the future. "We've made big investments to make sure all of our brands could become multiplayer," Guillemot announced. "We're coming out with Driver, Splinter Cell, Assassin's Creed and Ghost Recon, which will all have multiplayer".

Last year’s Assassin’s Creed 2 was a single-player release but even that isn’t escaping Ubisoft’s multiplayer net of all-inclusion with a DLC update scheduled sometime in the future. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will also see a multiplayer beta on release.

This technique to make everything and its dog multiplayer is apparently the thing to do this year for publishers, with EA saying they’ll be doing the same.